What is Wrong With These People???
The other day, Senator Dick Durbin stood up on the floor of the Senate and said:
Durbin has been denounced and strongly criticized for his statement, both in the Senate and from the White House. Bill Frist has been hurling wild fabrications about what Durbin said, and then getting outraged at what he claimed Durbin said, calling it "anti-American." Scott McClellan called Durbin's remarks "reprehensible" and said his comparison was "beyond belief." John Warner accused him of making "loose comments" that "have no basis of fact or history."
Many of those rushing to attack Durbin seem to focus on historical details of Nazi atrocities, or Pol Pot's genocide, or Stalin's gulags. Senators Mel Martinez of Florida, and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky actually pointed out that "that millions of people died in the camps that Durbin cited, while no one has died at Guantanamo." (I don't believe anyone pointed out to the Senators that people have died in our custody in Afghanistan and Iraq.) This line of argument led one blogger to suggest that their slogan must be "The US: we're not as bad as Stalin!"
More frighteningly, I've heard voices on the radio suggest that Durbin's error is not with history, but in somehow missing the fact that these detainees are "terrrorists!" and are very, very bad men who are out to destroy innocent women and children. The implication, and sometimes explicit statement, is that these terrorists deserve whatever they get. A variant of this is the suggestion that somehow, in some way, this wasn't standard practice, and was the excess of one of our infamous bad apples. (This variant would hold more water if the techniques reported had not all been approved at the very highest levels for use at Guantanamo.)
What the hell is wrong with these people?!
Durbin's point, which I think he made very clearly, is that, in the old days, treatment of prisoners like that reported by the FBI agent was only practiced by horrific regimes. That, five years ago, the list of nations one might expect to find practicing such tactics did NOT include the United States. And it didn't include us not because we hadn't thought of it, or hadn't been engaged in life-and-death struggles for our nation's very existence, but because we as a nation chose to be better than that! We used to hold ourselves to a moral standard that we would not treat human beings in ways that we wouldn't treat a dog just because they are bad men, have done bad things, or want to harm us. That was one of the ways we distinguished ourselves from those scum.
Durbin didn't say we were using Zyklon B, or forcing men to cut down trees in Siberia, and spending time reminding us that we aren't is just distraction. His point was that we are no longer holding ourselves to our own high standards, and we have sunk to a level that was formerly associated only with regimes that sank far lower, who we used to criticize, in part, for behaving the way we are now.
Americans should not be treating human beings that way. I don't care if they are terrorists. We should not degrade ourselves like that. We are better, and we owe it to ourselves and the world to behave that way. We would jail a man who chained up his dog and left it to lie in urine and feces. To act as though it shouldn't upset us that our government is treating human beings that way... it's unfathomable.
(And don't even get me started on the fact that we still don't know how many Gitmo prisoners actually fought us in Afghanistan, and how many were rounded up in sweeps or accidentally looked the wrong way at a bounty-hungry tribal leader. I'm too upset right now to compound it by thinking it could be happening to innocent men.)
For more info, check out the Talk Left blog.
Update: I refuse to discuss this post, or Dick Durbin with anyone who has not actually read the entirety of Durbin's statement.(pdf)
"If I read this to you, and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags or some mad regime--Pol Pot or others--that had no concern for human beings."The description from the FBI agent Durbin read described detainees being chained to the floor in a fetal position, left without food or water, and forced to defecate and urinate on themselves, and then lie in it for hours. The FBI agent reported the use of extremes of temperature, so cold that the detainee would be shaking, or heat over 100 degrees with no ventilation, and continuous bombardment with loud noise.
Durbin has been denounced and strongly criticized for his statement, both in the Senate and from the White House. Bill Frist has been hurling wild fabrications about what Durbin said, and then getting outraged at what he claimed Durbin said, calling it "anti-American." Scott McClellan called Durbin's remarks "reprehensible" and said his comparison was "beyond belief." John Warner accused him of making "loose comments" that "have no basis of fact or history."
Many of those rushing to attack Durbin seem to focus on historical details of Nazi atrocities, or Pol Pot's genocide, or Stalin's gulags. Senators Mel Martinez of Florida, and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky actually pointed out that "that millions of people died in the camps that Durbin cited, while no one has died at Guantanamo." (I don't believe anyone pointed out to the Senators that people have died in our custody in Afghanistan and Iraq.) This line of argument led one blogger to suggest that their slogan must be "The US: we're not as bad as Stalin!"
More frighteningly, I've heard voices on the radio suggest that Durbin's error is not with history, but in somehow missing the fact that these detainees are "terrrorists!" and are very, very bad men who are out to destroy innocent women and children. The implication, and sometimes explicit statement, is that these terrorists deserve whatever they get. A variant of this is the suggestion that somehow, in some way, this wasn't standard practice, and was the excess of one of our infamous bad apples. (This variant would hold more water if the techniques reported had not all been approved at the very highest levels for use at Guantanamo.)
What the hell is wrong with these people?!
Durbin's point, which I think he made very clearly, is that, in the old days, treatment of prisoners like that reported by the FBI agent was only practiced by horrific regimes. That, five years ago, the list of nations one might expect to find practicing such tactics did NOT include the United States. And it didn't include us not because we hadn't thought of it, or hadn't been engaged in life-and-death struggles for our nation's very existence, but because we as a nation chose to be better than that! We used to hold ourselves to a moral standard that we would not treat human beings in ways that we wouldn't treat a dog just because they are bad men, have done bad things, or want to harm us. That was one of the ways we distinguished ourselves from those scum.
Durbin didn't say we were using Zyklon B, or forcing men to cut down trees in Siberia, and spending time reminding us that we aren't is just distraction. His point was that we are no longer holding ourselves to our own high standards, and we have sunk to a level that was formerly associated only with regimes that sank far lower, who we used to criticize, in part, for behaving the way we are now.
Americans should not be treating human beings that way. I don't care if they are terrorists. We should not degrade ourselves like that. We are better, and we owe it to ourselves and the world to behave that way. We would jail a man who chained up his dog and left it to lie in urine and feces. To act as though it shouldn't upset us that our government is treating human beings that way... it's unfathomable.
(And don't even get me started on the fact that we still don't know how many Gitmo prisoners actually fought us in Afghanistan, and how many were rounded up in sweeps or accidentally looked the wrong way at a bounty-hungry tribal leader. I'm too upset right now to compound it by thinking it could be happening to innocent men.)
For more info, check out the Talk Left blog.
Update: I refuse to discuss this post, or Dick Durbin with anyone who has not actually read the entirety of Durbin's statement.(pdf)
posted by Paul at 3:17 PM |
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